Political power grows out of the nozzle of a 3-D Printer.
There are too many “O ring” voters (democrats).
Well the manufacturing realities discussed in this article are 100% on the money. Manufacturing a product at profitability, keeping the reject ratio above 96%, is a herculean effort in risk management. In China, there are 1,000 little things to watch, which you could probably take for granted on a product made in the West.
The article doesn’t specifically point out that it was the O-ring failure that gave modern industries these concepts, the concept of risk management to a sigma level being introduced by NASA (or the Japanese before that, one could argue). At NASA, a product can never-ever explode. Producing umbrellas on the other hand, is a lot less critical, and the risk management a lot more relaxed. Hence, we get sh*tty products that make it into the containers and into our stores.
I have discovered, after a lot of pain, that Taiwan is the better choice. They are already steeped in the methods of the West. Their prices are just about on par with mainland China. They are really eager and willing, and just flat easier to do business with. My hope is that other manufacturers wise up to this observation.
And yet globalism is embraced by the “elites”.
The term o-ring always makes me think of the men’s room scene in Austin Powers.
Ummmm - if the two klutzes each drop the vase half the time, then to 25% success rate is based on bad math - but from another post, you are so insulated in your little Chinese world that it must make perfect sense to you to ignore things you disagree with.
For instance, automobiles now last far longer than in the middle 20th Century, when passenger autos, though simpler in construction, were usually worn out and economically unrepairable by 100,000 miles; many long before.
It took the shift of the American customer base buying superlative Japanese products manufactured under Deming's TQM principles to forcefully wake up car manufacturers here.
And that wakeup in terms of attitudes of assembly-line workers has been only partial. Plenty of them have necessarily been supplanted by robotic technology.
I live in a county whose two large auto plants, quite active when moved here 35 years ago, have long been shuttered.
Political power grows out of the nozzle of a 3-D Printer.
The MBA class decided in the Seventies that American workers were the expensive, drug-abusing vase-droppers. A “disciplined” workforce overseas looked much more attractive in that era of crumbling American quality. And the complexity part is a natural tendency that needs to be guarded against in every business - whether it has off-shored operations or not.
Cheap labor only gets you so far for almost all (non textile) manufactured goods. Frankly, labor is but small cost component in the over cost to make a durable good. If labor was "free" i.e. slavery this would only save 3-5% on the cost of manufactured goods. To to increase the "bang for the buck" the foreign made goods are made with cheaper materials and lower quality control in order to get the price down because cheaper labor by itself can't do it alone. This done to justify destroying the USA's industrial base.
Why keep vase droppers?
I heard that for some positions where there is a single job opening, Amazon will hire three people to do it for a trial period, then actually keep the best one. I’m sure most companies cannot afford to hire this way, and it an interesting way to avoid having to sequentially go through multiple candidates until you get to the one you want. Try them in parallel.
Bureaucracies typically act like living organisms in that they are always growing and consuming. Each individual within it is always trying to justify their cost and as a result the entire organization is doing this organically, even if it’s completely outside of it’s philosophies and procedures. It’s hard to find an example more obvious than when an organization is started (sometimes grass roots and without planning) for some temporary charitable or social cause. They are never temporary, and by the time they have been giving a lot of time to ‘evolve’, they have grown to become a massive monstrosity of complexity, each part of which is constantly, if even only subconsciously, attempting to secure and justify it’s own importance within the organization, which also includes attempting to justify the growth of the organization as a whole. The forces from within are always toward permanence, stasis, and protection (survival). Even a subcontractor to a subcontractor in the supply chain of a large organization is going to attempt to establish it’s own stasis including whatever growth and bloat that will eventually result from it. The tenancy is rarely ever toward more efficiency, except when it purely involves profit margins, but at an organic organization, margins are never the sole goal. “Growing the pie” may actually mean smaller margins, but those margins are from a greater overall revenue. Someone is usually examining decisions that reduce efficiency and increase growth in relation to the benefit, but not necessarily from outside of the organization. This can only be achieved by COMPETITION at every level.
Vase dropping should not be assumed.
Economists never account for the cost of this additional management when they discuss offshoring. Instead, the existence of a bloated managerial class is simply taken for granted.
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Mush like a government agency which eventually supports nothing and produces nothing except a perpetuation of the government agency.
Answer:
Operations Research
The science of routing and distribution.
Great article and great comments. I spent 35 years doing manufacturing process development and manufacturing engineering. Installing, bringing-up and maintaining processes in US, Mexico, China, Malaysia, Germany, Hungary and the Philippines. Each had its unique manufacturing culture some good, some bad. I could write volumes on what goes right and what goes wrong and how to get to the bottom of problems and implement solutions.
Many of our problems were related to how the manufacturing sites were measured. The easiest thing to mesures is numbers shipped. If that is all you measure you are doomed when shipping a bad part is counted the same as a good part. Quality and yield loss is much more elusive, sometimes you do not know who, where and when the vase was dropped. We chased 0.1% yield losses as each 0.1% was missions of dollars. It was a wild ride for 35 years and enjoyed it, and ya know, most of the solutions were not high tech. It was the simple things that usually killed us. ;o)